GDC 06: Will Wright and Spore

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The mouth of Maxis talks passion and research as community details are re-stated.

By Dan Adams

After a few sessions and a keynote address from Will Wright, we thought we'd have a little bit more to say about Spore following GDC. We actually figured there might even be some new impressions and some new features to highlight. But we were denied. Denied! Well, we did hear a couple of new tidbits that reaffirmed our belief that this is actually a game as well as some community details that are pretty interesting, but we didn't actually get to see the game in action. The closest we came were some early prototypes from before last year's GDC prototype model.

Yeah, we're a bit disappointed. Spore has become the object of incredible fascination in the office. Not only because it looks so cool, but also because the gameplay aspects are still a little cloudy. How will the game be scored? How easy is it to win or lose? What types of challenges will players have to overcome in some of the more advanced portions of the game? Unfortunately, we'll have to wait for more info about this, but will likely see much of it at this year's E3. We hope.

Even with the lack of new concrete detail, we did manage to hear some interesting things from a few of the developers working on the project, including Will Wright. As far as I can tell, he's probably one of the biggest nerds in our galaxy and still manages to be a surprisingly engaging speaker, even when he's totally not talking about what you were hoping he would.

In his keynote, he didn't go crazy showing off all of the new features and interesting creatures of Spore, but instead talked about his own inspiration and initial research into bringing such a bizarre creation to the mainstream. The brunt of this research involved reading billions of books about all subjects having anything to do with Spore. Astrobiology theories, universe constants, world creation, the origins of the universe, microbiology, and more are food to a mind ready to absorb ideas.

Over an hour of speaking, Wright elicited laughter for his crafty and odd sense of humor and fun fact tangents, educated a crowd about theories of universe and life, and explained how all of his research and game theory fit together to create the original prototypes of Spore. The Sims Online was like the Bagger 288 while Spore is like a Ferrari. His process for the game evolved from a simple space idea to a powers of 10 idea. Generative Content is now the new term for Procedural Content after he took a vote from the audience. 2001 and his early dreams of an AI that acts human influenced his life greatly. This is only the tip of the iceberg of a speech that covered everything from Russian rocket science to calculating the risks of bringing any project to the market and theories that we are likely alone in the galaxy to how they wanted to make sure players feel like they were artists when using custom content editors. I guess the most important thing about this speech from a gamer's perspective is that he managed to intrigue us about the game all the more without actually saying anything detailed about the game.

With the lack of new info from Will Wright, we headed to some of the other sessions about pre-planning, the importance of prototyping and building community around pollinated content. While the sessions were all interesting in their own way, aside from some looks at very early prototypes of Spore in 2D and 3D, not much was said that we don't know about the game except that what we saw of Spore last year was essentially created for the GDC demo, which basically makes it a prototype of its own, which is probably why we didn't see much specific gameplay but instead focused on some of the broader aspects of the design.